274
PARTISAN REVIEW
into an infinity of ice. The soft variant is no longer capable of this. It
merely strains every muscle with unforseeable
(!)
vehemence.
It
can pre–
vent us from speaking authentically about the real, but it can no longer
prevent us from keeping silent about it authentically. Literature was, to
use a lofty expression, the bulwark of this silence. Literature made a point
of not speaking (sometimes not speaking with great precision) precisely
about that.
The problem of the lofty
A bulwark is a serious thing. It's no child's play.
In
my opinion, and
in contradiction to its own nature, it makes literature into something big
and consequential. As we used to say, literature could be and was the only
"place" to remind us of our lost (pilfered, squandered) freedom. Let's not
beat about the bush.
It
really was of consequence; it could be of conse–
quence; it had to be of consequence.
This brought with it the attendant danger that if a writer was not
properly circumspect, he ended up confusing the importance of literature
with his own. By degrees he came to believe that he too was important.
And once a writer believes in his own importance, you can kiss him
good-bye. This delusion of grandeur is worth bringing up because at
times even good writers would fall into the trap.
It
wasn't as easy as it looked. We had to accept, even guarantee, our
own lack of seriousness while looking the seriousness and brutal grimness
of the region (our space), unflinchingly in the eye. We had to confront
the problem of what could be done with the bearable weightiness of be–
ing in the shadow of the timeless threat of the unbearable lightness of
being.
Furthermore, once this thing was cleared up, theoretically at least,
there was still more than enough confusion to go around. For instance, in
the early and mid-seventies the tentative new goings on in prose stressed
the primacy of the text over its setting, of text over context. But now and
again, the books conceived in the new spirit would also satisfY the above–
mentioned moral criteria, which is not meant to be a piece of self–
criticism or nostalgia, of course. (As we are fond of saying, our books be–
came
historical
books; as we are fond of saying, a portion of the East–
European novel is dead, nor is there a single book that is not grieving
over a dead sentence, the type that owed its existence not to itself or to
other sentences, but for instance to the prohibition relating to it, but too
late in coming. Still, it seems to me that [by definition?] books written
with a concern for language have more life to them. They change, of
course, because we read them differently. The pathos of courage has lost
its luster. But something that this same pathos concealed has remained,
